A Good Idea in the Beginning Trickles off into Noisy Nothing

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2005)

Had the writers and director of THE ISLAND been able to sustain the fascinating first half hour of this flimsy film, the result might have been an enlightening examination of the current discussion of cloning. But as soon as the movie captures our attention it fizzles and what is left is two and a half hours of noisy endless destructive chase sequences that put this reviewer to sleep.
Using fine actors like Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson and Sean Bean one would think more attention would have been paid to a good script. They have us in the beginning as we slowly come to realize that this space-age environment is not the 'rescue place' from the end of the world by contamination, but rather a very expensive human cloning lab where wealthy people up on top of the subterranean lab life have paid huge sums of money to have duplicate donors on whom to rely for organs and integument as age begins to erode their own. Every 'person' in the lab (thinking that they are waiting transfer to the Garden of Eden Island of the title) is actually a manufactured copy of the owners topside.
Well, not all secrets can remain hidden and McGregor follows a butterfly to discover the truth about the venture and the rest of the tale is McGregor's and Johansson's escape into the world above in search of their 'real' counterparts. Once on the surface of the earth the movie goes downhill fast in a mixture of special effects and destruction derby that it just loses all interest. This is a movie that only avid fans of McGregor and Johansson will want to see - because there is little else to recommend it! Grady Harp